Blue Sun Palace

When someone is telling you something big and scary, opening up, making themselves vulnerable, do you find yourself going still so as not to interrupt or startle them out of the vulnerable place? No sudden movements, right? Stillness is writer-director Constance Tsang’s approach, too, in her feature debut, Blue Sun Palace, which spends more or less a year in the lives of women working at a massage parlor in Flushing, Queens, and some of the people in their orbit. Sunny, smiley Didi (Haipeng Xu) is the linchpin, the one best friend Amy (Wu Ke-Xi) cooks for and adores, and the one shy Cheng (Tsai Ming-liang regular collaborator Lee Kang-sheng) is quietly courting, even as he sends money home to his estranged wife and daughter in Taiwan.

Blue Sun Palace can be bisected into a Before and After, with the bulk of the film spent processing the aftermath of an event at the parlor. I mean “processing” in close to a clinical sense, in the way film develops – not all at once but over time, where you can stare at the incremental evolution but not see the full picture until the process is complete. Tsang and cinematographer Norm Li mostly keep the camera at a remove: hanging back in a doorframe, or from behind a gauze curtain, at the top of an escalator, and the other side of a shower door. That stillness and remove creates its own kind of intimacy. It dares you to hold in an uncomfortable moment, to take in someone’s pain without looking away.

Blue Sun Palace is in fact so finely observed it gently presses right up to the limits of ponderous. This is the kind of movie where you watch, in long unbroken shots, someone fold up a ladder, another someone smoke a cigarette down to the filter, but you’ll walk away without total clarity of character motivations and even fates. It’s certainly lifelike: After all, it’s only people in the movies who perfectly understand each other. Blue Sun Palace lives in the gray area with the rest of us mortals. What it conveys, quite beautifully, is the essentialness in sharing your life with others, through joy and grief.